How Juici Patties Uses AI To Keep Its Family-Run Feel at Scale

There’s something special about a small, family-run restaurant. All too often, when a local dining spot becomes a franchise, its fundamental appeal is lost as operations scale. For Jamaican franchise Juici Patties, maintaining a family-run atmosphere is crucial. To accomplish that goal, the company has turned to a surprisingly high-tech tool: artificial intelligence.

Juici Patties began in Jamaica, where founder Jukie Chin made and sold Jamaican patties at his family’s grocery store. Today, it’s Jamaica’s top fast-food chain, and it has an ever-expanding presence in the United States. The company has locations in New York and Florida, and Daniel Chin, Jukie’s son and CEO of the company’s U.S. division, plans to eventually expand into every state.

Behind the scenes of this expansion, Juici Patties CTO Stuart Levy is connecting the brand with AI tools to ensure that each customer has the same positive experience they would get at the very first Juici Patties.

The customer experience starts with management. Chin and Levy can’t be on-site to show every new franchisee the ropes, so Juici Patties’ franchise management system is one of its most important AI tools.

“We use that to automate royalty collection, send out messages, and communicate with the franchisees,” says Levy. “It also houses key documents for each franchise.”

Like most AI tools, the software is constantly improving. “It's continuously being built out with different modules,” Levy says. “Right now, we're adding an AI module that will help give the franchisees assistance as they become more familiar with the system. It makes it easy to find key documents and answers.”

The franchise management software helps maintain consistency, as do the brand’s high-tech menu boards.

“If you see any images of the menu boards, they're all digital. They're integrated with the point-of-sale system and our social media,” says Levy. “So when there’s a price change or a new menu item, it's quickly displayed on the menu boards and our social media feeds. We can also use that board to display limited-time offers and any specials that we have coming down the pipeline.”

Anyone on the outside looking in might wonder how the Juici Patties corporate team decides where to open each new location and how each of those locations manages to become so profitable so quickly.

“On an operations level, we use mapping software, which is also vital to how we expand,” Levy continues. “It's what we use to determine where we're going to put a store and how many stores can fit in an area without cannibalizing each other.”

As each new location opens, the company’s supply needs shift. If there’s a stockout or bottleneck, customers will be disappointed, and new franchises will lose revenue when they need it most.

To reduce the risk of supply chain problems, Levy has implemented AI tools for predictive analytics into the company’s point-of-sale systems. The implementation itself took some time and trial and error, but now, Juici Patties locations everywhere are benefiting.

“It’s great for data capture, and it provides pretty robust reporting that we use for menu analysis, understanding where we are with benchmarks, and comparing ourselves to restaurants in and around the locations of our stores,” Levy says.

At one Juici Patties franchise, predictive analytics showed that customers in the area wanted to buy food earlier in the day, before the restaurant opened. That location changed its operating hours accordingly and saw an immediate, significant increase in sales.

It’s not quite the same as a family restaurant polling its regulars, but it has the same effect: Each Juici Patties location learns about its customers and makes adjustments to accommodate their needs.

New AI tools are constantly emerging, and Levy is eager to put them to use for the benefit of the restaurant’s customers, employees, and franchise owners.

“Right now, I'm actually working on building out a white-label app so that Juici Patties will be able to have an app that we can offer customers,” he says. “They can download it from the different app stores and order directly from us. They save on delivery fees that they'll probably experience with third-party ordering platforms.”

AI preserves the authentic, family-restaurant feel for customers, but it also helps Juici Patties’ team stay connected as they make decisions to shape the company’s future.

“We're a small team here at Juici Patties on the U.S. side,” he says. “We need something to help keep everybody aligned while we don't have a big team, and AI is that crucial component. That does the job of four individuals and keeps us all in the same loop.”

There’s a lot of fear that AI could replace human workers in the restaurant industry and elsewhere. At Juici Patties, however, AI is a tool to simplify operations, keep people connected, and replicate the family-run restaurant feel at scale.

BDG Media newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.